Canada glider pilot swallows memory card after fatal accident

A woman on a hang-gliding flight with an instructor fell to her death Saturday in western Canada, about 50 miles east of Vancouver, in a terrible accident. The investigation into the death of Lenami Godinez-Avila, 27, has taken a bizarre turn, according to CNN:

(Instructor) William Jonathan Orders, 50, was arrested Saturday and charged this week with obstructing justice, accused of swallowing a memory card from a video camera that accompanied the pair on the flight near Agassiz, British Columbia, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.

Orders is scheduled to appear Friday afternoon in provincial court in Chilliwack for a hearing to determine whether he can be released on bail. But it’s unclear if it will be postponed – as it was Wednesday – if authorities haven’t retrieved the memory card, said Neil MacKenzie, communications counsel with the province’s criminal justice branch.

X-rays confirmed the card was in Orders’ body, and authorities as of Thursday morning still were waiting for the object to pass, RCMP Constable Tracy Wolbeck said. Investigators hope to recover the object.

The CBC is reporting Godinez was trying the sport for the first time on popular Mount Woodside in the Fraser Valley:

Godinez and her Canadian boyfriend had hired a professional pilot to take her up in tandem but she somehow came loose from the harness and fell hundreds of metres.

“I watched her fall until I couldn’t see her anymore,” said Nicole McLearn, who witnessed the accident.

McLearn says Godinez’s run off the mountain looked awkward, not unusual for a first-time hang-glider, but in the air something was clearly wrong — Godinez was wearing her harness but it was no longer attached to the glider.

Police, along with the sport’s governing body and WorkSafeBC, are investigating, the CBC reported. Godinez, originally from Mexico, had lived in Canada for nine years and worked as an administrator for the provincial government.